The present disclosure relates generally to aircraft traffic management, and more specifically, to systems and methods for processing flight information that describes aircraft state data, a flight route, flight plan, or one or both of current or intended trajectory of an aircraft.
Planning flight operations results in the creation of flight plans. Flight plans are used to document basic information such as departure and arrival points, estimated time en route, various waypoints the aircraft must traverse en route, information pertaining to those waypoints, such as actual or estimated altitude and speed of the aircraft at those waypoints, information relating to legs of the flight between those waypoints, and aircraft predicted performance. This type of flight plan may be used to construct a flight trajectory including the various legs of the flight, which are connected to various waypoints along the route. This flight trajectory may include a lateral trajectory defined in the horizontal plane and a vertical trajectory defined in the vertical plane. The flight trajectory may also include the element of time across the horizontal and vertical planes. Flight intent generally refers to the future flight trajectory of an aircraft expressed as a four-dimensional profile until destination.
There are multiple sources of a flight route, flight plan, flight intent and flight trajectory. Some of the sources include the aircraft, air traffic control, an airline operations center or another ground source. In some cases the same source, such as the aircraft, can provide multiple variations of any of these.
Each source of flight information represents a myopic view of the overall flight trajectory and aircraft state of a particular aircraft. As an example, an aircraft downlink message and a flight message from an Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) will each provide a different view or perhaps a unique set of flight information describing the flight route, plan, intent, or trajectory of a flight. Each message, from different sources, reflects the current conditions known to that particular system (i.e., the sensed, entered and calculated flight information data such as flight plan, aircraft state, etc.). If surface winds change at the destination and thus the landing runway, the aircraft downlink message would not reflect this change until the information is applicable for that flight. In practical terms, a 10-hr flight would not need to be apprised of the change in arrival procedures or changes to landing runway until applicable. However, the ANSP may be aware of the wind and runway changes and provide information indicating so. In this example, this may be a message that is not tied to the specific flight in question, but still may be applied to it. In this practical scenario, any system receives the flight information messages and has three options: (1) do nothing; (2) process them in the order received (which introduces many issues); or (3) amalgamate them.
Previously, multiple flight information messages for the same flight were processed in the order in which they were received. This introduced many errors as messages were received at the same time; some messages were not applicable; and some messages which were treated as new because they were recently received were actually old messages.
There is a need for systems and methods for processing messages containing flight routes, flight plans, flight intents, flight trajectories, and other flight information received from multiple sources to create an amalgamated representation of one or both of current or intended aircraft flight information.